The Confusion

Ireland
1690-1691

THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had been founded by a man King William did not like very much (John Churchill), and as a sort of punishment for that, the regiment had now been exiled in Ireland for almost two years. Bob Shaftoe had learned many things about this island during that time: For example, that it was commonly divided into four pieces, which were variously styled Kingdoms or Duchies or Presidencies or Counties depending on whom you were talking to and what peculiar notions they held concerning the true nature and meaning of Irish history. Connaught was one, and the others were Ulster, Leinster, and Munster.

Bob heard about Connaught first, but saw it last. Nevertheless, he felt he knew something of it. He had heard endless discourse of it during the last thirteen years from his Irish “out-laws,” the kin-folk of the late Mary Dolores, most of whom bore the surname of Partry.

Until of late, the Partry clan and their swine, kine, assorted free-ranging poultry, and one bewildered sheep had teemed in a bit of shed in Rotherhithe, which lay across the Thames from Wapping, about a mile downstream of the Tower of London. Teague Partry-one of three Partrys who had, at one time or another, enlisted in the Black Torrent Guards-had often volunteered to stand watch on Develin Tower, the extreme southeastern vertex of the citadel, in spite of the fact that it was sorely exposed to raw weather coming up the River, and detested by all of the other soldiers. The cold wet winds, he claimed, reminded him of Connaught, and from his Develin vantage point he could see all the way downriver to Rotherhithe and keep an eye on his four-legged assets. Teague rhapsodized about Connaught all the time, and did it so convincingly that half the regiment was ready to move there. Bob had taken it with a grain of salt because he knew that Teague had never in his life ventured more than five miles’ distance from London Bridge, and was merely repeating tales told to him by his folk. From which Bob had collected, very early, something that it would have benefited the Partrys to know, namely that Ireland was a mentality, and not a physical place.

After the Revolution the Partrys had slaughtered all their livestock, deserted their Regiment, gathered up what money they could, and escaped to Dublin. Several months later, Bob had been shipped to Belfast with the rest of his regiment, and with the Dutch colonel who’d been put in command of it. Now, King William found John Churchill hard enough to trust when he was inside London Wall. He could not possibly bring himself to trust Marlborough (or any other English commander) with an elite regiment on Irish soil, especially when Churchill’s former master, James, was only a few marches south, in Dublin. So it was under a Colonel de Zwolle that the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards voyaged to Belfast, and under him that they tarried on that island over two winters. When Bob next saw Churchill, he would assure his old chief that he had not missed a thing.

From their point of disembarkation the regiment had marched south for a few days, and then wintered over in a camp at Dundalk, which lay near the border between the part of Ireland called Ulster and the one called Leinster. Out of a full strength of 806 men they suffered casualties of thirty-one dead, thirty-two so disabled that they had to be retired, and many hundreds who were laid low for a time but later got better. Most of these casualties were put down to disease or hunger, a few to accidents and brawls-zero to combat, of which there was none. This was an exceptionally good record.

They were encamped near a Dutch regiment commanded by one of Colonel de Zwolle’s old drinking-and hunting-buddies. The Dutch soldiers suffered very little from disease, though they were every bit as cold and hungry. They kept their camp so clean that it was mocked as “the Nunnery” by certain men in Bob’s regiment, who espoused a more temperate approach to hygiene. But when English soldiers began dying at a rate of several per day, the Black Torrent Guards finally began to pay some attention to de Zwolle’s nagging and to emulate some of the practices of their Dutch neighbors. Coincidentally or not, the number of men sick in bed began to drop not long afterwards. When spring came and the rolls were called, it was found that they had suffered much lighter casualties than other English regiments.

In June 1690, then, William of Orange finally arrived in Ulster as only a King could, viz. with three hundred ships, fifteen thousand troops, hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, more Princes, Dukes, and Bishops than a boat-load of playing-cards and chess-sets, and a lot of Dutch artillery. He marched south, pausing at Dundalk long enough to collect the regiments that had wintered over there, and then invaded Leinster at the head of thirty-six thousand men. He made straight for Dublin, where James Stuart had established his rebel Parliament. King William had a wooden house, designed by one Christopher Wren-that same bloke who was building the new St. Paul’s in London. It was ingeniously made so that it could be taken down in sections at a few minutes’ notice, transported on wagons, and put back up again wherever William decided to establish his headquarters. Normally he erected it in the midst of his army, which was not at all usual for a campaigning King, and made a good impression on his soldiers.

James Stuart had been spoiling for a fight for a year and a half. He marched north from Dublin at the head of twenty-five thousand men and, after some preliminary maneuvering, set up a position on the south bank of the river called Boyne.

The next day, William was reconnoitering the north bank in person, looking for crossing-places, when a Jacobite cannonball hit him on the shoulder and knocked him off his horse. Jacobites on the opposite bank saw it happen, and saw a vaguely king-shaped object being carried away in haste by agitated Protestants.

What they could not see, from that side of the Boyne, was that the cannonball was a spent ricochet that had glanced off William’s shoulder and dealt him no serious harm. They made the wholly reasonable assumption that William the Usurper was dead and reported as much up the chain of command.

The next day William launched a diversionary attack across the Boyne not far from where he had been hit. He waited for James to move his main force that way, then crossed the river in force elsewhere. The first to mount this main attack were William’s best and favorite soldiers, the Dutch Blue Guards. But they were followed closely by several companies of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, a plum job that never would have been afforded them if they’d been under the command of Marlborough. De Zwolle had spent the winter plying his superiors with brandy and sending letters to London; that probably explained how Bob and his men were given such a splendid opportunity to have their heads hacked off in a bog. They crossed the Boyne, at any rate, and formed up on the south bank, and withstood several Jacobite cavalry charges. This was not an easy thing to do. They did it in direct view of King William, who had found a vantage point on the north bank from which to observe his beloved Blues.

The captain of Bob’s company was killed very early and so Bob had to assume effective command of threescore men for the rest of the day. This had very little effect on anything. Whether or not their captain was alive, Bob’s job was to get his men to believe that they really were safer standing together as a unit, as opposed to throwing their muskets down and diving into the river. Far be it from Bob to think about his company’s or his regiment’s reputation at Court.

If he had thought about it, he might have counseled his men to break and run instead.

That night the King came to their camp to tell them what fine fellows he thought they were. Now the Irish Army had simply vanished; the only evidence they’d been present at the Boyne was the thousands of pikes and muskets they had thrown down on the ground, the better to outrun their pursuers. King William’s host had climbed up out of the river-valley and spread out across churned and trampled pastures between the hamlet of Donore and the village of Duleek-places that, like f?ries, were spoken of, by Irishmen, as if they really existed, but that could not actually be seen. As they went they harvested the dropped weapons, hugging bristly faggots of them to their chests and finally letting them drop in clanking heaps when they decided to set up camp.

As their baggage had not caught up with them, they spent the night in the open, and as there were no trees hereabouts they used the captured weapons for firewood. They were not worth keeping as weapons-a fact that was obvious to Bob, but tended to be ignored by those who espoused the view that the Irish had thrown them down out of cowardice. Bob found flintlocks without flint, muskets with cracked barrels, pikes that could be snapped over the knee.

A few hours after nightfall, anyway, they received their King. He had suffered an asthma attack while fording the river and was still wheezing piteously-which evidently hurt, because of the cannonball injury-so he tended to speak in very short sentences. He was sitting askew on a tired horse. He spoke in Dutch to de Zwolle and then in English to the company captains and to Bob. He did not look at them, however; he was very close to falling asleep in the saddle, and could not tear his eyes away from the musket-bonfires.

What he said was that, with regiments such as his own Black Torrent Guards, he could not only take Ireland but Flanders, too, and fight all the way to Paris.

Bob stayed up late gazing into the fire, which was slowly devolving into a red tangle of melted gun-barrels, and pondered some of the longer-term implications of the King’s statement. Overall, the notion was somewhat troubling. On the other hand, an invasion of France might afford him an opportunity to seek out Miss Abigail Frome.

The next day they left the field pimpled with smoking twists of blackened iron and marched south to Dublin. James Stuart had already run off to France. Protestants were running wild, looting Catholic homes. Bob ventured into a certain quarter where Protestants were more apt to behave themselves, if indeed they went there at all. He found Teague Partry sitting on a stoop smoking a clay pipe and gravely observing the bums of passing milk-maids, as if nothing much had happened recently. But the right side of his face was flushed red, as if sunburnt, and pocked with recent wounds that all appeared to have radiated from a common center.

Teague bought him a mug of beer (it being Teague’s turn to do this) and explained to him that James’s foreign cavalry regiments had panicked first and, finding their escape route blocked by the Irish infantry, had opened fire on them to clear the way. He put it to Bob that Irishmen had it in them to fight effectively when they were not being massacred by Continental cavaliers who were supposed to be on their side, and (pointing significantly to his face) when they were provided with guns that projected musket-balls instead of blowing up in their faces. Bob agreed that it was so.

Later the bulk of William’s army marched west across the island, out of Leinster and into the southern realm of Munster. They laid siege to Limerick, which was one of the few places in Ireland that had proper fortifications, and could serve as the venue for a proper military engagement. Unfortunately, the Irish had little use for proper military engagements. William’s Dutch cannons blasted a hole in the city wall; Bob rushed in at the head of his company and got conked in the head by a bottle hurled at him from the top of a ruin by a massive hag in a wimple, screaming something at him in Gaelic. Bob, who knew nothing about his father, or his mother’s father, had long been preoccupied by the suspicion that he might be partly, or even largely, Irish, and while he lay unconscious on the rubble of the shattered wall of Limerick, he had a strange dream concerning the nun who had thrown the bottle-the import of it was that she was his great-aunt or something, scolding him for everything bad he had ever done.

His skull was merely dented, but his scalp was nearly taken off, and had to be sewed back on by a barber-surgeon who advised him to grow his hair back again as soon as he could; “And for god’s sake get a wife before you go bald, or women and children will run away from you screaming!” He was only trying to be cheerful, but Bob growled at him that he had already found his true love, and that scars on his pate were the least of his concerns.

The Earl of Marlborough finally got leave from the distracted King to sail across to Munster. He took the cities of Cork and Kinsale, but he did it without the help of his Black Torrent Guards. Then he went home to spent a comfortable winter in London while Bob and the regiment remained encamped outside of Limerick, fending off occasional sorties by the Irish cavalry, and keeping up a running, sporadic battle with bands of armed peasants who styled themselves “rapparees.”

The rapparees actually did have firearms that worked, and had learned to strip them down into their parts in seconds. The locks they kept in their pockets, the barrels they corked shut and hid in sloughs or streams, the stocks they thrust into wood-piles, or anywhere else a bare stick might go unnoticed. So what appeared to be a crew of half-naked peat-cutters or a congregation strolling to Mass could scatter into the waste at a word or a gesture, and reconstitute itself an hour later as a band of heavily armed marauders.

Because of the rapparees there were few places on the island, outside of Ulster, where Englishmen could feel safe in groups of less than an infantry company. But one of those places was the south bank of the river Shannon just downstream of Limerick. As the winter eased, and the hair grew back over his wound, Bob began to go there by himself and sit under a solitary tree overlooking the river and smoke his pipe and brood. The reading of books was not available to him. He’d lost his interest in whoring. He had heard his men’s stories, jokes, and songs so many times he could not suffer them any more. Drink made him feel poorly, and card-playing was pointless. He suffered, in other words, from a want of things that he could do to pass the time.

So he sat under his brooding-tree and gazed across the wide river Shannon. Like all the other rivers of the British Isles, it had a long estuary leading in from the sea to a port (Limerick in this case) that had been built where the river first became narrow enough to be bridged. The Shannon was the boundary between Munster and Connaught, and so by looking across it Bob could gaze into that land of legend so highly spoken of by the Partrys. From here Connaught looked like the rest of Ireland. But what did he know?

When King William had come over before the Battle of the Boyne he had brought fresh recruits to replace the ones who had sickened and died over the winter, but not enough of the sort Bob favored. Bob had however managed to recruit half a dozen English Protestants who had never actually been to England. They had grown up on various farms in Ireland that their fathers or grandfathers, who had been Cromwell-soldiers, had taken away from Gaelic Catholics. But the various revolutions of the last decades had turned their families into Vagabonds of an extraordinarily hard and dour cast, roaming around Eire in search of organized violence. Bob knew how to talk to men like that, and so they had spread the word among themselves and gravitated toward the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, and continued to gravitate still.

After the Battle of the Boyne, a Protestant wool-merchant of Dublin (who had grown wealthy from the fact that the Irish were not allowed to sell their wool overseas except through England) had donated some portion of his lootings to buy these new recruits weapons and uniforms, and they had formed a company. So the Black Torrent Guards were now a slightly oversized regiment, with 14 companies instead of 13, and a nominal strength of 868 men.

One day Bob reached his brooding-tree and turned around to discover that he had been followed out by Tom Allgreave and Oliver Good, two of the original Phanatiques he’d recruited last year in Dundalk. They were a quarter of a mile behind him, exchanging the lead position every few steps, as if egging each other on. Each of them had a sword dangling from his belt, part of the motley collection of brought and stolen weaponry that had been showered upon the Fourteenth Company by that wool-merchant.

To give great long blades to such boys was dangerous. Fortunately the boys knew it, or anyway had found out as much, over the course of the winter, by slashing each other in what were meant to be playful exchanges. By the time Tom and Oliver drew within hailing-distance of Bob, he had guessed why they had come: They required instruction in sword-fighting. Normally this was considered a pastime of effete courtiers, a pointless, useless, out-moded affectation; in a word, idle. But among common folk, especially older ones who remembered Cromwell, the lore of the spadroon continued to circulate. Word had apparently got round to Tom and Oliver that Bob knew something of the practice. Those boys were unreconstructed Puritans who had nothing to do all winter long, as drinking, gambling, and whoring were ruled out on religious grounds. One could pray for only so many hours a day. It was not possible to practice marksmanship because powder and balls were strictly rationed. So it was not clear to Bob whether they had decided to take up the practice of sword-fighting because they genuinely cared about it, or because there was literally nothing else for them to do.

It did not matter either way, as Bob was idle, too. And so as Tom and Oliver got to within a horseshoe-throw of his brooding-tree, Bob knocked the ashes out of his pipe, stood up, reached around himself, and drew out his spadroon. The Puritans were thrilled. “You’ll want to stand sideways, as you make a narrower target that way, and it gets your sword-arm that much closer to the other bloke,” Bob said. He raised the sword up until its guard was touching his nose, the blade pointing vertically into the air. “This is a sort of salute, and do not on any account mistake it for some foppish affectation, as it says to any man who stands before you, ‘I mean to engage in swordplay with you, do not just stand there and be hit, but either defend yourself, or else retire.’ ”

Tom and Oliver now nearly killed themselves getting their weapons unsheathed, and then nearly killed each other getting them into the salute position. “Oliver, what you have in your hand is a rapier, and I do not know the method of its use as well as I do that of the spadroon,” Bob said, “but anyway we shall try to make shift with the tools at hand.”

Thus did Bob open up a new defencing academy on the south bank of the river Shannon. It became popular very quickly and then just as quickly collapsed to some half a dozen men who were genuinely interested in the subject. After a month they were joined by Monsieur LaMotte, a Huguenot cavalry captain who happened to spy them as he was riding by one day. He was expert with a cavalry saber, which was a somewhat similar weapon to the spadroon, but he had also studied the rapier, and so he was at last able to give Oliver some instruction in what to do with his weapon. In general, cavalry officers (who tended to be Persons of Quality) would never fraternize thusly with common foot-soldiers, but the Huguenots were an exceeding queer lot. Many were common Frenchmen whose families had grown wealthy in trade and then been kicked out of France. Now they were in Ireland, gaining some small revenge by teaching the defencing tricks of the Continental nobility to savage Anglo-Irish Puritans.

OLIVER GOOD’S GRANDFATHER had dwelt for a dozen years on a farm between Athlone and Tullamore, which placed it in Leinster. But it lay not far from the Connaught frontier, which was regarded by Protestants as the utmost boundary of civilization. He had obtained title to the land by driving off its Catholic inhabitants, the Ferbanes, who had driven their cattle west across a ford of the Shannon and thereby vanished from ken. Good’s justification, if he needed any, was that those Ferbanes had taken part in the Rebellion of 1641 and expanded their farm at the expense of some neighboring Protestants who had come over from England in Elizabethan times. But he had to stop using that justification after he was confronted by several ragged men who appeared on the property one day claiming to be the descendants and rightful heirs of those same Elizabethan Protestants! After that, if anyone dared question his claim to the land, he said it was his by right of conquest, and because he had a piece of paper that said so.

He and his children toiled on the land as only Puritans could toil on the land, and made many improvements, few of which were obvious, none of which produced results quickly. They bore arms all their days and often rode the countryside hunting down “disorderly elements.” They did not see those ragged Protestants any more, and forgot about them altogether, except for their surname, which could be read from the odd gravestone: Crackington.

After Charles II restored the monarchy, however, it was learned that the Crackingtons had somehow found their way back to England and made themselves pests and parasites on their relations, who went to the new Parliament (along with thousands of other Anglo-Irish landholders who had been displaced by other Cromwellian soldiers) and demanded that the Phanatiques be cast out of Ireland. As one of the new King’s first acts had been to put Cromwell’s head up on a stick, their chances of success seemed reasonable enough. In the end, they got only part of what they wanted. Some of the Cromwellian settlers were kicked off their land and some were not. The Goods managed to hang on to theirs, but only because of some obscure and contingent political happenstance at Westminster.

They were not, however, free to practice their religion any more, and that was what drove them off the land in the end, and sent half of them to Massachusetts. The Crackingtons came back and took over the farm, with all of its improvements, and began to prosper, and even paid for the reconstruction of the local Anglican church (which the Goods had made useful as a barn). This had occurred not long after the birth of Oliver Good, with the result that he had only ill-formed childish memories of the farmstead that he intended to re-occupy one day.

Then when James II became King, he re-Catholicized Ireland. The Crackingtons awoke one morning to find breaches in their fences, and wild Connaught kine grazing in their enclosures, guarded closely by red-haired men who spoke no English and carried French muskets. It was not possible to persuade them to leave because the new Catholic government in Dublin had confiscated the weapons of the English gentry. After not very long the Crackingtons judged it prudent to leave until a judge could rule on the title to the land-or the titles to the lands, rather, as by this point the farm comprised half a dozen contiguous patches of dirt, each of which had an equally complex story. The Ferbanes, it turned out, had been carrying on boundary-feuds with their neighbors for five hundred years-some were mere interlopers who’d been driven inland by the Vikings.

At any rate the Crackingtons packed up what household effects they could, rounded up a few horses (the Ferbanes had driven most of them off), and set out for Dublin, where they kept a town-house. Along the way they were set upon by rapparees. But just when it looked as if all were lost, they were saved by a Protestant militia band that came on in a grand, noisy rush and drove the rapparees away. The Crackington patriarch thanked these mangy-looking Protestants again and again, and promised to reward them in golden guineas if they would sent a representative to call on him at his town-house in Dublin-“my name,” he said, “is Mr. Crackington and anyone in Dublin-” (by which he meant any Anglican English gentleman) “-will be able to direct you to my house.”

“Did you say Crackington?” said one of the militia. “My name is Good. Do you know me?”

After this certain unpleasantries, which Oliver Good declined to speak much of, had been visited upon the Crackingtons, and it was unclear whether any of them had made it as far as Dublin-but if they had, they’d have found their town-house looted, and occupied by Catholics, anyway. But the point was that all of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were like that farm between Athlone and Tullamore.

England was divided into parcels of land whose ownership was clearly established. It was like a wall made of bricks, each brick an integral thing surrounded by a clear boundary of white mortar. Ireland was like a daub-wall. Every generation came around with a fresh hod and troweled a new layer of mud atop all of the previous ones, which instantly hardened and became brittle. The land was not merely encumbered; it was the sum of its encumbrances.

Connaught was supposedly different because it had not succumbed to the incursions of the English. But it had troubles of its own because those Irish who declined to be conquered fled there in times of trouble and squatted on the land of the Irish who had always lived there.

DEFENCING-PRACTICE WENT ON MUCH LONGER than anyone really wanted. The war was not quick to resume in the spring of 1691. King William’s supreme commander in Ireland was now Baron Godard de Ginkel, another Dutchman. His objective was obviously Connaught, which was guarded by the Shannon and by the fortified cities of Limerick, Athlone, and Sligo. Irish diggers bossed around by French engineers had devoted the whole winter to building up those cities’ earth-works. Therefore Ginkel wanted boats and pontoons for crossing the river, and guns for knocking down the fortifications. Those cost money. Parliament had very little of it, and had become surly about handing it over to their Dutch king, whom they were already sick of. Nothing was forthcoming until the end of May, which convinced Bob and all the rest that they were truly lost and forgotten in Ireland, and destined to be stranded here, and to become the next players in stories of the Ferbane-Crackington-Good type.

For his part, King Louis XIV of France did little to disabuse the combatants of the feeling that they had dropped off the map of Christendom. The Battle of the Boyne had been the battle for Ireland, or so everyone in Christendom believed, according to a letter Bob had got from Eliza. They believed it not because it had any particular military weight but because there had been a King on each side of a river and one had crossed over it and the other had turned his backside to it and run away, and not stopped running until he’d reached France.

During the battle that had given the Black Torrent Guards their name, their commander, Feversham, had been asleep. Even when he was awake he was daft, because of his brain injury. John Churchill had been the real commander and Bob and the other foot-soldiers had done the fighting. Yet Feversham had got the credit for all. Why? Because it made a good story, Bob supposed, and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise the war for Ireland, which had ceased to be a good story when the Kings had left the stage.

Thus Bob in a very bleak mood all through April. On the 9th of May, a flock of sails appeared in the Shannon estuary, and sword-practice came to a halt, and the pupils of Bob’s fencing-academy gathered silent under the shade of the brooding-tree to watch a French convoy coming up the river towards Limerick. The ships were cheered by small crowds gathered in tiny raucous clumps on the Connaught side, and saluted by guns on the walls of Limerick. It was noted by all of the men around Bob that the cannon-salutes were returned in full measure (they had no lack of powder), but the cheers were not (these were supply-, not troop-ships).

Monsieur LaMotte took a spyglass from his saddle-bag, climbed halfway up the tree, and made observations. “I see the colors of a field-marshal; the big ship, there, third from the lead, she is carrying the new French commander…” then all the air went out of him in a long sigh, like bagpipes collapsing, and he said nothing for a minute or so, not because he had nothing to say but because he was the sort of fellow who did not like to utter as much as a word until he had made himself master of his emotions. “It is the butcher of Savoy,” he said in French to another Huguenot who was standing under the tree.

“De Catinat?”

“No, the other.”

“De Gex?”

“This is a field-marshal, not a priest.”

“Ah.” The other Huguenot ran to his horse and galloped away.

In English, La Motte explained: “I have recognized the coat of arms of the new French commander. His name is St. Ruth. A nobody. Our victory is assured.”

The muttering of the men resumed, and there were sporadic outbreaks of laughter. LaMotte climbed down out of the tree wearing an expression as if he’d just seen his mother being keel-hauled under St. Ruth’s flagship. He handed his spyglass to Bob, then went to his horse without a word and cantered away, stiff-backed.

Bob was glad to have the loan of the spyglass, for one of the smaller ships, farther back in the line, had familiar lines. His eyes unaided could not make out the colors flying from her mizzen-mast. With a bit of fiddling and focusing, and steadying the spyglass against the bole of the tree, he was able to see the coat of arms he had been looking for: for St. Ruth had brought a pair of lieutenant-generals with him, and one of them bore the title Earl of Upnor.

BOB HAD SAT AND WATCHED marvels during his idle spring: a butterfly forcing its way out of a cocoon, and an apple-blossom burgeoning from a sticky green pod. Those two unfoldings had much in common with each other, and with something that happened in Bob’s soul during the next hours. The behavior of the Huguenot cavalrymen served as a model and source of inspiration. Not that Bob generally wanted such things, but his time in Ireland had left him pressed together and folded up inside a stiff dry husk that protected him but imprisoned him, too. The same was true of all the others. But the knowledge that St. Ruth was here had sent a dread-thrill running through the camp of the Huguenots and shocked them all alive. Bob had no idea who St. Ruth was or what he had done in Savoy, but it did not matter; the effect of it was that the Huguenots now suddenly perceived themselves as being in the thick of a story. It was not a King-story and might never be written down, but it was a good story to them.

Years ago Bob had gone deaf in one ear, and had put it down to standing close to guns. But then one day a barber had reached into that ear with a wee hook and wrenched out a bung of brown wax, hard as pine-wood, and just like that Bob could hear again-he could hear so well it almost hurt, and could sense things going on all round him with such definition that for the next day he had difficulty keeping his balance. On the 9th of May 1691, all of Bob’s senses came alive thusly, and his lungs filled with air for the first time since he had waded across the Boyne with Jacobite musket-balls taking bites out of his hat.

They struck camp and withdrew from Limerick altogether during the next fortnight, and marched with the sun on their backs to Mullingar, in the center of the island, where all of King William’s host was assembling. A few days after they arrived the trains of wagons began to come from Dublin in their clouds of dust and noise, bringing the great cannons and mortars that had been sent from the Tower of London.

On June 8th they marched west to Ballymore and easily took a little out-post there, and made prisoners of one of the best Irish regiments, which had been left exposed in the middle of nowhere for no reason.

On June 19th they reached Athlone, which bestrode the Shannon. It consisted of an English town on the Leinster side-which the Jacobites abandoned almost immediately-and an Irish city on the Connaught side-which they retreated into, and defended with unnerving ferocity for two weeks. Scouts were sent across the Shannon; most did not come back. The ones that did brought news that cascaded down the chain of command to Bob: General St. Ruth had brought his whole army to a camp west of the Irish town, just out of range of Ginkel’s Dutch cannon.

The battle of Athlone was straightforward and bloody: Ginkel’s artillerymen fired a cannonball a minute for ten days, and an avalanche of bombs and mortar-stones, across the river into the Irish town and completely destroyed it. Meanwhile his foot-soldiers tried again and again to force a crossing on the stone bridge joining the English to the Irish town. This was the only way of reaching the Connaught side of the Shannon, and everyone knew it. The Irish had destroyed one segment of the bridge. The gap would have to be closed with timbers. Under hellish covering fire of artillery, Ginkel’s troops would go there at night and try to throw beams across the gap while Irish snipers hidden in the ruins of Athlone pierced them with musket-balls. Then Irish troops would show equal bravery in going down and setting the timbers afire, or casting them into the Shannon.

The Irish won the battle of the bridge, but lost that of Athlone when two thousand of Ginkel’s troops forded the Shannon downstream on June 30th and forced their way into the Irish town.

St. Ruth thereby lost Athlone, and all of his troops who were trapped inside of its walls. The rules of Continental siege warfare were in effect, meaning that towns could hope for easy treatment if they surrendered but that resistance was to be punished by massacre. Bob’s chief worry, then, was that he would be given a direct order to go into Athlone and massacre someone. The only thing that would be worse would be if the victims turned out to be Mr. McCarthy’s company of foot-soldiers from Baron Youghal’s regiment. Mr. McCarthy was a Dublin candle-maker who had spent all of his money to raise and outfit a company, and made himself its captain. Along the way he had recruited Teague Partry, who had in turn recruited several other of Bob’s out-laws. Jack Shaftoe’s sons-Bob’s nephews-had gotten swept up in Regimental life, much as Jack and Bob had done at the same age. For all Bob knew, the boys might be carrying muskets now. So it was not out of all possibility that Bob might be obliged to swing a spadroon into the necks of his nephews during the mopping-up of Athlone. It was the sort of dilemma that might make a fellow anxious. Fortunately Bob had (as was his habit) imagined and anticipated the worst, and made up his mind in advance what he should do if it came to pass: He would excuse himself, declare himself Irish (easily enough done, as ’twas only a state of mind anyway), make the sign of the cross over his red-coated breast, and go running off into Connaught with the Partrys. He even had a sort of excuse worked out: He’d declare that the hag who’d brained him with the bottle in Limerick was his long-lost great-aunt. This scheme had the added advantage of getting him closer to Upnor. After the Jacobites had lost the war, he’d sign up with an Irish mercenary regiment and go campaigning on the Continent. If he picked the right time and place to desert, he could then simply walk to wherever Abigail was.

This plan actually seemed more attractive to him the more he considered it, and the more phantastickal refinements he added onto it. By the time he crossed that half-wrecked bridge into what had been the Irish side of Athlone, he was almost looking forward to finding whatever was left of Mr. McCarthy’s company, and surrendering to it.

What he did not want was to find them dead, or to see them being hunted down in the streets by the Danish horsemen, who had reverted to the ways of the Vikings. So his fondest hope and worst nightmare were separated by an infinitesimally slender distance.

But he found nothing in Athlone save dead or dying Irishmen buried in settling piles of rubble. Fortunately a good part of the civilian population of Athlone had already fled into Connaught. A small Irish garrison was trapped near the bridge and enthusiastically butchered by the Danish cavalry. However, the great bulk of St. Ruth’s force never even saw fighting, and remained safe in its camp. Ginkel spent several days getting his army across the river, which meant that St. Ruth could stage a leisurely and orderly retreat of his whole army toward the interior of Connaught, or indeed all the way to the port of Galway if he chose.

So Bob found himself in the fabled land of Connaught. No, it couldn’t be; this part was connected to Leinster and the rest of the damned island by that bridge, it was an excrescence of the bad, ruined Ireland into the good. And fortunately it was surrounded by a wall to prevent the contagions of the world from spreading. Irish Athlone was just a buboe, holding the plague pent up inside.

When they got the order to march out of its western gate, then they would enter the true Connaught that Teague Partry had sung of during his long raw watches on the Develin Tower.

“IT IS SUNDAY, the twelfth of July, Anno Domini sixteen hundred and ninety-one,” said Captain Barnes helpfully, shaking Bob’s shoulder. “The train has arrived; we expect a long march.”

Very faint pink light gleamed in jackets of dew that had formed on the cold pale stones all around. Bob exerted all his will not to close his eyes and go back to sleep.

They were still in Athlone, sleeping in a half-wrecked wool warehouse that stood on the road uphill from the bridge. Wheels were grinding on the ashlars of that road, drawn by hundreds of patient hooves that beat a lulling tattoo on the stones.

Ginkel’s army had marched out a day ago and left them behind to await a train of wagons from Dublin, and to make sure it got across the bridge safely. Today they would have to catch up with the army and, if that army was on the move, accomplish a second march as well.

When someone was trying to kill him and his men (which was not really all that often), Bob’s chief professional obligation was to think about that. At all other times he thought about food. Treading carefully among sleeping men, he came to a place where he could look out through a bomb-hole and see orange flames fondling the bum of Black Betty, the company’s prize kettle, out in the court. There would be a sort of gruel boiling in it, with shreds of mutton flashing to the top occasionally, and an inch of grease floating on it. In other weathers a cloud of steam would be roiling from Black Betty’s mouth, but today she was surrounded and hemmed in by ?ons of fog proceeding out of the west, seemingly drawn by the feeble promise of the pink gloaming over Leinster. If any steam was coming out of Black Betty, it was like a fart in a whirlwind.

By the time Bob had groped his way to the coffee-pot and burnt his hands and lips on a tin cup of Mocha’s finest, the pink light that had greeted him earlier had been snuffed out by the progress of this fog. When he went about nudging men awake, they were all certain it must be midnight, and not dawn as Bob earnestly claimed.

Connaught would not let go of her mysteries easily, then. By the time they fell in with the regiment, chasing the customary, hideous screams of sergeants through the gloom, a kind of profound blue-gray light had begun to emanate from the fog: light without warmth or even the colors that made men remember warmth. There was a lot of bumping into other companies in rubble-congested streets, and standing still for no discernible reason, and then at last a gate materialized around them and they understood that the regiment was forcing its way through a bottleneck. They marched out of Athlone and left its unburied dead to the flies-for only flies could reach the ones who lay in the cellars of the fallen-in buildings.

Immediately the road began to fork and fork again, offering passages to Roscommon, Tuam, Athleag, or Killimor. Bob gazed down every one of those tracks with frank longing. But young officers on horseback were posted at every turning to ensure that the regiment, and the wagon-train, did not stray in the fog.

They marched on the high road, the road west toward Galway. Everything about the conduct of the operation said to Bob that it would be a long trudge with no objective other than to put distance behind them, and no prospect of actual fighting. But late in the morning-or so he guessed from the color of the fog, which had taken on a brassy shimmer, like a counterfeit guinea-he heard musket-fire far off.

It could not be his regiment. It must be some other battalion of Ginkel’s main army. So Ginkel had not marched on ahead of them at all. He had done a day’s march and then stopped. And from the sound of those muskets it was clear why: St. Ruth had only retreated a few miles down the road from Athlone.

They joined in with another column, marched for a mile, and crossed a river at a place called Ballinasloe. Immediately the rope of men and beasts raveled and frayed into a wide mess, each strand pursuing a different course. This would only occur if they had butted up against the army of St. Ruth, and were spreading out to form a battle-front.

Lone cavaliers dashed from left to right and right to left, wearing the colors of Brandenburgish, Danish, Huguenot, or Dutch cavalry regiments; these were engaged in the supremely important tasks of finding the ends of the line. The great bodies of soldiers were still proceeding towards the front, occasionally crossing over each other’s paths, but more and more often moving along parallel courses. The fog shone more brightly to their left, which suggested that they were going generally westwards. Bob’s left knee was hurting rather more than his right one-not only were they moving down-slope, but the ground on the right, toward the Ballinasloe road, was higher.

They’d seen no sign of the Jacobite army other than a few Irishmen hanged by the necks from tree-limbs along the road, presumably for desertion. But as they worked their way down from the road they did come upon a dead horse from Patrick Sarsfield’s Irish cavalry regiment, which was still warm and steaming. It was in a field, or rather, an expanse of disturbed soil. Every patch of dirt in Ireland bore the marks of desperate soldiers who had pawed through it in search of potatoes that might’ve been overlooked by other, slightly less desperate fellows. This horse had broken its leg stepping into a hole where some lucky man had struck a jackpot. Its rider had put it down with a pistol-ball to the brain and limped away on a pair of French-style boots in good repair. Bob followed the boot-prints, and his men followed him, until a mounted Dutch officer-one of de Zwolle’s aides-coalesced out of the fog, ordered them to abandon this pursuit, and signalled that they should form up into a line. And a good thing, too, as the ground had been getting soupier, and they were very nearly down in a bog by this point.

Now that all burdens had been thrown down and the commotion of the march had ceased, Bob found that he could hear for a great distance. In fact, he was convinced that they had mistakenly set up only a stone’s throw from the enemy. But the sound came and went with the sluggish convolutions of the fog, telling him that it was only a trick played on his ears by the queerness of the air, and further evidence that Connaught was a realm of mischievous f?ries.

Setting aside eldritch deceptions, and listening patiently whilst smoking his way through three pipe-bowls of tobacco, and (above all) thanking that barber for having drawn the wax out of his ear, Bob collected the following:

That there was a bog before them, much broader than he had supposed at first, perhaps half a mile from this side to the other. That water stood, rather than ran, at its bottom. That it was occupied by the enemy, but not heavily; it was not a position to be held, but an obstacle to slow down the onslaught of the Protestant legions. Beyond it, however, the ground rose up again, in some places to heights that would command the whole battlefield. The great bulk of the Jacobites were there, working with picks and shovels in reasonably dry ground (the implements bit rather than splashed). When a breeze finally came up, it became possible to hear canvas flapping. They had not taken their tents down yet; they had no thought of retreating. To the north and the south-that is to say, on the wings-were the cavalry. By process of elimination, infantry was in the center.

The Irish foot did not have the equipment or the training to form itself up into pike-squares and so were defenseless against horse. Therefore St. Ruth would only put them where cavalry could not go. It followed that the bog must be a formidable barrier, for St. Ruth was trusting it to preserve his infantry from a frontal charge. The Butcher of Savoy, as the Huguenots called him, had, however, felt obliged to put his cavalry at the ends, to prevent the infantry from being flanked and destroyed; so there must be easier ways of getting across the bog in those places.

In this section of the line-which seemed to be towards Ginkel’s right, or north flank-all was orderly and quiet. But at the left or southern flank, which might be as much as two miles away, they were having great difficulty forming up into line because of some skirmishes-most likely Sarsfield’s enterprising and high-spirited cavalry. Sporadic cackles of fire came from that direction and occasionally swelled into abrupt throat-clearings, but never developed into a proper engagement.

As this was Sunday, the French and Irish regiments were taking turns at Mass; Bob could track the gradual progress of two or perhaps three different priests along the Jacobite line of battle, stopping every so often to deliver a warlike homily and celebrate a truncated version of the sacrament. He only knew un peu de francais and a wee bit o’ Gaelic, but after hearing several repetitions of these homilies, and the synchronized cheering of the congregants, he thought he had a clear enough notion of what was being said.

The breeze became dependable and the fog finally began to dissolve.

He strolled to the left and exchanged gossip with Greer, the sergeant of the fourteenth company. Then he strolled to the right and discovered an English cavalry regiment and chatted with one of its sergeants for a time. By now it was possible to understand where the Black Torrent Guards were situated. Ginkel’s army, like St. Ruth’s, had been arranged with infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings. Bob’s regiment was farther to the right than any of the other foot, and his company farther right than any other company; from their location northwards to the road, it was nothing but horse all the way.

The fog had lifted to the point where he could see his own regimental colors, about a musket-shot away, slightly uphill of the line established by the soldiers. He walked toward them and arrived just in time to see a conference breaking up: Colonel de Zwolle had served brandy and given orders to all of his company commanders. Bob about-faced and fell into step beside Captain Barnes, who was returning to the company.

“Ne pas faire de quartier,” ’ Bob said. “That’s what the priests are saying across the bog.”

Captain Barnes had a degree from Oxford. “After what happened in Athlone, it is to be expected.”

“Is it the same for us, then? No quarter?”

“Sergeant, your aversion to killing Irishmen is the talk of the regiment. Do not embarrass me today by turning suddenly into a paragon of mercy.”

Captain Barnes was the fifth son of a modestly important Bristol family, and had a quick mind. It had been expected of him that he would become a vicar. Instead he had discomposed his family by deciding to become an infantry officer. He was not yet twenty-five and still seemed more the student of divinity. He liked commanding troops in battle, and did a surprisingly good job of it, as long as they hewed to the tactics and maneuvers of conventional warfare, against similar opponents. Which might sound like damning with faint praise, but very few men could actually do this. He grew uncertain, and began to make bad decisions, when asked to do anything that was not explicitly covered by the rules of war. At such moments other rules must of necessity come into play, and the rules he was wont to fall back on were the sort that were taught in church. And he was bright enough to see that this was, in a war, ridiculous.

“You want a brute for a sergeant, so that he can go do the mopping-up while you wring your hands and disavow his unchivalrous deeds,” Bob said. “For that type of sergeant you must look in a common regiment. But we were organized by Churchill-”

“The Earl of Marlborough, to you!”

“In truth, to me he is John. But whatever he is called, he has odd tastes in sergeants, and though he has been replaced by de Zwolle, you are stuck with me-unless you would care to promote another from the ranks.”

“You’ll do, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

Finally the fog had lifted so that they could see as far as they pleased, though things more distant were wrapped in shimmering auras, bristling with iridescent needles. All was more or less as Bob had seen it with his ears. Across a bog they faced a hill whose near slope was exceeding well trenched, the trenches filled with Irish musketeers in gray coats. They would be armed with good new French muskets, not the trash that had served as firewood after the Battle of the Boyne. Far to the south the Jacobite line curved around the flank of the hill into some trees, and thus out of Bob’s view. Directly in front lay what appeared to be the worst part of the bog, where three water-filled ruts twined together in the heart of a morass. The main Athlone-Galway road was no more than a few hundred paces off to the right. It sported first a bridge and then a long, strait causeway over the boggy ground.

A mass of English and Huguenot cavalry were deployed in a clump around the road. Bob could see several regimental standards at a glance, meaning that this was probably styled a division, thus probably commanded by a major-general. Most likely the Huguenot Henri de Massue, who, though he’d never see France again, still went by his French title, the marquis de Ruvigny. Ruvigny was one of three generals King William had sent out to Ireland in the spring to replace ones who had exasperated him with their slowness. Another was a Scotsman, Hugh MacKay, who was commanding the division of infantry-Bob’s division, for the nonce-that was now looking out over the bog.

The bridge and the causeway could be reached by a short advance, which raised the question of why this cavalry division had not already taken it. The answer lay half a mile farther down the road, where an old castle rose up above the western end of the causeway. It was little more than a wreck: just four mossy stone walls, with mounds at the corners suggesting towers. But the tops of the walls were furry with musket-barrels, and the surrounding hamlet had been fortified with earth-works. Several roads then radiated westwards from the village. Various Jacobite regiments had positioned themselves short distances up those roads so that they could converge on any force that made it over the causeway and into the killing-zone around the castle.

Bob spent more time than was good for him searching out the standards of the Irish foot regiments and trying to identify Baron Youghal’s colors. That would tell him approximately where Mr. McCarthy the candlemaker was situated with the Partrys’ company. But he was unable to see matters clearly, as most of these regiments were dug in on the hill farther south and across the bog, two miles or more away, and their colors had not been particularly large or glorious to begin with.

“This is an excellent position,” Bob said admiringly. “It could not be better-for the Irish.”

Captain Barnes gave him a sharp look, but softened when he understood that Bob was merely stating facts, and according a sort of gentlemanly respect to the foe. “Today we will be dragoons, until we are told otherwise.”

“Where are our horses, then?”

“We must imagine them.”

“Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind.”

“We need never mount up. Dragoons are supposed to ride into battle, then dismount and fight as infantrymen,” Barnes reminded him. “We walked here, that much is true. But that’s in the past. Now it’s as if we have all just climbed out of our saddles.”

“That is why they have placed us here, hard up against the cavalry-we are to support them,” Bob supposed, looking into Barnes’s eyes. Barnes showed no sign of disagreement. Bob turned away from General MacKay’s part of the field-the bog in the center-and toward General Ruvigny’s-the road, the causeway, and the village. At first glance this latter seemed the harder assignment, but he felt unaccountably relieved that they would not have to harry thousands of Irishmen out of the maze of ditches that they had cut into the peat.

Bob continued, “We are meant to advance along the road, I take it.” He then turned his attention to the castle, and tried to count the colors on its walls and in the surrounding village.

“It is a better assignment than to advance across that bog,” Barnes observed.

“Anything would be better than that, Captain,” Bob said. “When I am hit I want to fall with sun in my eyes. Not mud in my lungs.”

BOB, NORMALLY AN IN-THE-THICK-OF-THINGS kind of soldier, now had the unfamiliar opportunity of sitting still and watching the battle unfold, just like a General. This came about because the cavalry to which they were attached was not ordered to do anything for the first few hours; no General in his right mind would send his regiments across that causeway in the face of those defenses. In fact, very early on most of Ruvigny’s cavalry were detached and sent miles down the line toward the left wing, leaving only a regiment or so to guard the road. If the Black Torrent Guards had been real dragoons (with horses) they probably would have gone, too. As it was, they were stuck in the least active part of the battlefield.

But every other part of the line attacked. The only part Bob could see was the foot in the center, but from distant rumblings of thousands of hooves, and movements of reinforcing horse across the Irish rear, he could tell that a large cavalry engagement was under way at the opposite end.

MacKay’s infantry spent the first few hours of the battle failing against their Irish counterparts. Though ’twere more just to say that Ginkel had failed by ordering them even to try. The Irish had cut successive lines with protected passages from one to the next. The walls of the ditches were graded to afford protection against an attack from the east while leaving their occupants naked to fire from the west. So as soon as MacKay’s men fought their way across the sucking mud into one ditch, they would find that their foes had all vanished like wills-o’-the-wisp and reappeared in the next ditch uphill, whence they could fire musket-balls into the attackers at their pleasure. A small number of English actually managed to get through all of the ditches and hedgerows, but by the time they had done so, they were more a smattering of refugees than an army; and when they finally staggered out into open country along the base of the hill, they were confronted by an Irish battle-line that looked as if it had drawn itself up on a parade ground. The Irish charged with a roar that reached Bob’s ears a few seconds after he saw them leap forward, and the surviving English fell back all the way to where they had started an hour before. By the time any semblance of order had been reestablished among MacKay’s battalions, the Irish had re-occupied the very same positions, in the forward-most ditch, as they’d been in when the fog had first lifted. The field looked the same as it had before, save that dead Englishmen were strewn all over it. Farther south it was the same except that the dead were Danish, Dutch, Hessians, and Huguenots.

While respecting Irishmen as individuals, Bob had always viewed their regiments primarily as a source of comic relief. He was fascinated to see them chasing Hessian storm-troopers across a bog. It was the first time in his knowledge that their ferocity and love of country had come into alignment with military competence. At the same time he was apprehensive, for the Partrys’ sake, of what might happen next, because the cavalry fight at the far end sounded more ferocious than any he had ever heard. He could not believe that the French and Irish could withstand such an assault for long. But nothing happened; the Protestant cavalry never broke through. The battle was a stalemate.

Bob watched two more attacks across the bog. Both failed in the same way as the first; the Irish not only stopped them cold, but threw them back, and not only threw them back but overran some of their positions and spiked some of their field-pieces. Captain Barnes: “’Tis worse even than a Pyrrhic victory; ’tis a Pyrrhic defeat.”

General MacKay was as wet, cold, and furious as a cat in a rain-barrel. He had led the failed attacks personally. As the afternoon turned into evening he had worked his way north up the line. It was plain that the center could not be forced, and he had no real choice but to probe that part of the bog around the piles of the causeway. For the fourth attack, therefore, he got permission from Ginkel to lead the Black Torrent Guards-who had done nothing so far-on a thrust parallel to and just a bit south of the road.

This attack failed like the others. Bob and his men had learned from the mistakes of the fellows they had been watching, and so they took fewer casualties. But it failed nonetheless, partly because of the ditches, and partly because of the plunging musket-fire that came down from the parapets of the ruined castle when they advanced within range. It was demoralizing to see a large building such as Aughrim Castle vanish behind a cloud of gray smoke as hundreds of muskets were discharged at once.

But they all suspected that they might have succeeded with more men. Bob mentioned to Captain Barnes, who reported to de Zwolle, who told General MacKay, that before the battle he’d spied a pair of regimental standards in the bog just by the causeway, where it entered Aughrim village. During one of the earlier attacks he had watched those colors move far south to the center of the line, where the fighting had been fiercest. They had not returned since. So the village’s defenses were not what they had once been.

MacKay rode the line, having a look at the Black Torrent Guards, and pronounced them not half so wet, muddy, and exhausted as the men who’d attacked in the center; which he looked on as proving that this was not such a very boggy part of the bog, and that cavalry might get across it. He was being trailed by a motley string of European and English cavaliers who, because they had not done any fighting yet, were spotless and jittery. At one point MacKay got into a dispute with them, which he ended by wheeling his horse and charging directly toward Aughrim Castle just to show that it could be done. His horse took a header over a wall and stopped hard in muck on the other side, and MacKay flew off and ended up wetter, dirtier, and angrier than he had been before. Most of the cavaliers were convinced it could be done, and the others were now too ashamed to speak their minds.

The Black Torrent Guards were ordered to advance as far and as fast toward the castle as they could, and then throw themselves down in the bog and shoot at any Irish heads that showed above the parapet. It was hoped that this would lessen the damage inflicted on Ruvigny’s skeletal division of cavalry as they galloped across and alongside the causeway. For every other route along which Ginkel’s army might advance had been blocked; Ruvigny’s squadrons were the only fresh troops he had; and the only way to avoid total defeat was to mount a charge along that causeway.

The Black Torrent Guards were sent across the bog first, in full view of the castle, to draw off some fire, but the Irish seemed to recognize that tactic for what it was and saved their loads for the cavalry, which came thundering down the road a few moments later.

Only ragged firing sounded from Aughrim Castle as the first squadrons rode directly past it. They galloped into the village with almost no casualties and found that it had been left nearly undefended, as Bob had predicted.

Bob got up on one knee to fire his musket at a head silhouetted against the evening sky, and was hit in the chest by something that made a strange zooming noise. He dropped his weapon and fell flat on his back.

When he woke up a couple of his men had ripped his coat open to examine the wound, which was in a bad spot, near where his left collarbone joined his breastbone. And yet Bob was still alive, and not coughing up blood. Not feeling bad at all, really.

He was being looked after by one Hamilton, a big bloke, infamous for uncouth qualities. Hamilton had planted a knee on Bob’s shoulder to pin him in a more convenient attitude, and was picking curiously at a hard object embedded in Bob’s flesh. Bob found this extremely annoying and said so more than once. “Oh, fuck it!” Hamilton decreed, and dived into Bob’s chest, planting his lips over the wound. After a quick suck and a bite he popped up again with something yellow in his teeth, and spat it out for examination.

“’Tis a pretty brass button,” he announced, “a bit dented by the ram-rod, but ’twill suffice to replace the ones we tore off your coat just now.”

“Or we may fire it back to its owner,” said one Roberts, who always did what Hamilton did, but not as well. He had a knee on Bob’s other shoulder. “If we should run out of ammunition, I mean.”

Not more than ten minutes had passed while Bob lay on his back on the ground, but when he got up again it was a new battle. All of Ruvigny’s horse had now crossed over, and more was on the way, galloping up from the opposite wing where they’d been balked all afternoon. The gates of Aughrim Castle were open, and a lot of screaming and hasty praying could be heard within its walls as the unlucky garrison was put to the sword (vide Rules of Continental Siege Warfare). The squadrons not participating in this massacre had positioned themselves around the edge of the village and made ready to be attacked by the Irish and French battalions not far away, but such an attack never came; something had gone wrong in St. Ruth’s chain of command, orders to counter-attack had not been issued or else were not getting through, and his generals were unwilling to do it on their own initiative.

Bob wrapped his coat around himself to cover the wound, which was bleeding, but not hissing or spurting. He strolled uphill a short distance and climbed up onto one of the earthen ramparts that the Irish had thrown up to defend Aughrim village.

He could see some Irish dragoons retreating off to his right. In the overall scheme this was amazingly stupid, and probably fatal, but they had no way of knowing.

“Sergeant!”

Bob looked down into the face of Captain Barnes, which was in the middle of a transition from intense anxiety to giddy relief; for the nonce it looked more quizzical than anything. “I was given to understand you had suffered a dire injury!”

“I was shot in the chest,” Bob said guardedly. “One of those musketeers drilled me about here, from perhaps fifty yards.” Bob glanced towards the corner of the castle from which the button had been fired. A French standard was being cut down by trophy-hunting cavaliers.

“Then you should be taking your rest! We have been ordered to garrison the castle,” said Barnes.

“Has my bedchamber been made ready?”

“Alas, there are no chambers of any kind, only roofless cells,” Barnes answered deadpan. “We could make you a bed from ammunition cases.”

“I thought they had none.”

“They have thousands of musket-balls in there,” Barnes said.

“Then why did they not use them?”

“Because they are made for English muskets-ever so slightly larger than the barrels of their French muskets.”

Hamilton had ambled to within earshot of this conversation, and responded, “Haw! I always knew we Englishmen had bigger balls than the French!” Indeed, all of the private soldiers found it hilarious. But sergeants and captains-who were actually responsible for getting musket-balls to the troops-could only wince at such a story, even when it had befallen the enemy.

Bob looked off to the south and saw a series of English and Huguenot cavalry squadrons slipping like a knife-blade into a gap between the Irish infantry, and the stunned cavalry to its rear. They were swinging round behind the Irish foot, getting into position to charge them, panic them, and mow them down like hay.

“Captain Barnes,” Bob said, “you have said it yourself. I have been shot in the chest and am plainly a casualty of war, hors de combat, and for now my duties must be assumed by another sergeant… Fortunately your company’s assignment is trivial. There will be no counter-attack made against yonder castle this afternoon.” Bob turned his back on Barnes and strode down the slope of the rampart, muttering, “Or this month, this year, this century.”

ONCE THE DANES and the Huguenots over-ran the field like flocks of starlings scouring the earth for worms, Bob’s red Guards uniform would not help him; this side of the bog, any man on foot was under a death sentence. Because the French/Irish phant’sied themselves the army of the true King (James II), many of their regiments wore the same red uniforms, and the only way to tell them apart was by looking for small badges or devices thrust into their hats: sprigs of green for King William’s forces, scraps of white paper for James Stuart’s. These were difficult to see even in good light. Bob’s hat had been lost in the bog anyway.

Fortunately the battle had long ago got to that stage where riderless horses were wandering about, instinctively forming up into little herds, looking for quiet places to graze. They were being pursued by men under orders to round them up. Bob ventured into a sort of no-man’s-land that had opened up between the village and some Irish battalions retreating from it, and pretended that he had been given such orders. For the available horses, he was striving against two men who were younger and quicker than he was; but being older and wiser and (today) luckier, he had the satisfaction of being able to rest, crouching alongside a fragment of stone wall, while they chased a saddled horse directly towards him. He vaulted up onto the wall, grabbed the mount’s dragging reins, and swung a leg over its saddle before it even knew he was about. He inferred that it had been ridden by a member of Ruvigny’s cavalry who’d fallen or been shot out of the saddle, but that it had followed its squadron across the causeway just to be sociable. At any case it was a good horse and fresh. Bob pulled its nose round southward and whacked it lightly with the flat of his spadroon.

He galloped into the heart of the battle while it still deserved that name, before it turned into a rout and massacre. Ruvigny’s cavalry had by now broken through the Irish flank altogether and were charging south, traversing the hill. To their left and downhill lay the entrenchments crowded with Irish foot-soldiers in their gray coats. To their right and uphill were the white tents of the Jacobite encampment. In front of them was nothing but a flimsy barrier of cavalry: not above three squadrons of what looked like an English Catholic regiment.

Bob had begun by galloping in the wake of this charge, but soon caught up and found himself in the middle of it-close enough that he could see the faces of those English Papists, Persons of Quality all, and watch them think as the attack bore down on them. Some seemed ready to die for their faith and rode forward with a certain look of calm ferocity that Bob admired very much. Some stood their ground-not, Bob thought, out of courage but out of terror, as rabbits freeze when the hawk flies overhead. Some wheeled and ran. But a contingent of three riders, who had been situated toward the rear, turned away and rode south in a way that looked purposeful to Bob.

Bob knew what they were doing: first, preserving their regimental standard (one of the three riders was the standard-bearer). This would enable them to erect the colors on a high place later, so that the scattered squadrons and stragglers could converge on it and reform into an effective battalion. Without that scrap of cloth they could never amount to anything but lost Vagabonds. Second, they were going to the other wing where Sarsfield was commanding the bulk of the Jacobite cavalry, and apparently doing a very good job of it; in a few minutes they would come back at the head of several regiments.

Bob out-stripped Ruvigny’s cavalry in an instant when they galloped into the Catholic squadrons and stopped to duel it out with pistols and sabers. French Protestants fighting for the King of England crossed blades with English Catholics fighting for the King of France. Bob, having no personal interest in their quarrel, rode through them all like a cannonball through a bank of smoke and discovered himself in open country pursuing the three riders.

The standard-bearer was moving slowest, and gradually falling behind. Bob almost had him when the fellow chanced to look back; then he let out a yell and spurred his horse forward. The two officers in front, perhaps eight lengths ahead of him, looked back to see their standard-bearer in trouble; he could not defend himself without dropping the colors. As this happened Bob got a direct view of their faces and realized for the first time that one of the two was Upnor.

After a brief exchange of words, Upnor drew back hard on one rein to wheel his mount around, while the other officer shot ahead to get the message out to Sarsfield. Bob-who had a lot to keep track of-heard a loud crack and assumed a pistol had gone off. The standard-bearer, four lengths ahead of Bob, faltered. Bob looked again for Upnor, but he had vanished! Then in the corner of his eye he saw the standard-bearer coming up fast-having brought his mount nearly to a stand-still while Bob was still at a gallop. Bob had no time to do anything but stick his spadroon out. The blade struck something hard and the weapon was wrenched out of his grasp, and he was nearly thrown back onto the horse’s croup. What saved him was that this had all occurred just short of a declivity in the hillside, a little water-course running straight down into the bog, therefore straight across their path. Both Bob’s horse and that of the standard-bearer had seen it coming, and in the absence of orders to the contrary, slowed down.

Bob recovered his equilibrium just shy of this gulley and shook his hand frantically in the air a few times. It felt as if it had been stung by a bee. Lacking another blade, he drew out his pistol, which he had put out of his thoughts until this moment because it was useless while galloping. But now he was standing still, as was the standard-bearer, no more than four yards away from him.

The standard was hung from one end of a full-length pike so that it would rise to thrice the height of a man and be visible above a teeming battlefield. While galloping, the bearer had held it nearly horizontal, like a jousting-lance, in his left hand, while using his right to hold the reins. Bob had overtaken him on the left and he had reflexively raised up the pike-staff to parry Bob’s blow; Bob’s spadroon had cut into it at an angle about a third of the way from the top and come to a stop, wedged into the wood.

The standard-bearer now raised the pole to vertical and planted it, leaving Bob’s spadroon high in the air and out of reach. Hugging the pike against himself and his horse’s ribs to steady himself, he drew out a pistol of his own. He was a beautiful blond English boy of about eighteen and Bob shot him in the head. He was wearing a steel cuirass to protect his torso and so it was the head or nothing.

A light misty rain had commenced and the late afternoon sun had gone out like a snuffed candle, leaving gray twilight. Bob looked down the gulley, drawn by an anguished noise, and saw Upnor’s horse thrashing around with a broken leg. Then he saw Upnor clambering up out of the gulley intact. The crack he had heard before must have been Upnor’s horse breaking its leg when it tried to stop and wheel around in the wrong place.

Bob had discharged his only pistol and there was no time to reload. The standard-bearer had squeezed his trigger involuntarily and fired his pistol into the air. Bob dismounted, staggered on cramped legs over to the standard, and threw it down. He glanced over at Upnor, who had got himself up above his horse on the brink of the watercourse and pulled out a pair of pistols, one in each hand. He aimed one at his horse and pulled the trigger; Bob saw the white sparks from the flint, but it did not fire-the pan had gotten wet.

Upnor now gave Bob a sort of appraising look. Bob planted his foot on the pike at the place where his spadroon was lodged in it, and pulled up on the end until it snapped; then he came up with the weapon in his hand. The Earl of Upnor took one look at it and then, with no hesitation, aimed his other pistol down into the ditch and put his charger out of its misery. He dropped both of his pistols, turned to face Bob, and drew out his rapier. For being something of a traditionalist in these matters, he had not yet adopted the more fashionable small-sword.

“Sergeant Shaftoe,” he said, “since we last met, your brother has achieved even greater infamy than he had then. Now the Battle of Aughrim has been lost. I am not likely to see the sun rise again. But I can at least thank Providence that she has placed you in my power, that I may salvage something of the day by sending the brother of L’Emmerdeur to Hell.”

“I phant’sied ’twas you who were in my power,” Bob muttered.

Upnor cast off his cloak to reveal a shining steel cuirass underneath, with a vest of light mail under that.

“Not at all chivalrous,” Bob observed.

“On the contrary, nothing is more characteristic of the chivalric classes than to put on armor and go round ridding the country of rebellious Vagabonds-as your own cavalry is demonstrating!”

With a wry tilt of the head, Upnor pointed toward the lower slopes of the hill where King William’s cavalry was hunting Irishmen, frantic to kill as many as they could before they lost the daylight altogether. The Earl was a sophisticated man who enjoyed this irony, and wanted Bob to share it with him.

“Enough talking,” Bob said, raising his guard to his face. “I did not come here to make friends with you.” And he snapped the blade down and away, completing the salute. Upnor took half a step forward, raising the rapier to a guard position, then made a little show of remembering his manners and acted out the faintest memory of a salute. He was so dexterous with a sword that he could convey certain qualities, such as sarcasm, simply through nuances in his movements. Bob now stepped towards Upnor, hoping to back him up against the brink of the gulley; this also situated Bob on slightly higher ground.

“It’s about the girl, isn’t it? Abigail, my pretty slave,” Upnor exclaimed. “I had forgotten.”

“No, you hadn’t.”

“Tell me, do you believe that killing me will help you repossess her?”

“Not really. She’ll pass to your heirs and assigns, and I will kill them.”

Upnor did not like this very well. “It is revenge, then,” he concluded. He spun on the ball of one foot, ran down the bank for several yards to build up speed, then leapt across to the opposite brink. “In that case you are obligated to pursue me-so I am entitled to choose the ground. Come over here, Sergeant!”

Bob backed up for a few paces to get a running start, but by the time he was ready to make his leap, Upnor had moved back up to stand directly across from him, rapier aimed out into the space above the stream, positioned to impale Bob in mid-jump. “You hesitate a second time! You could have cut me down before I jumped across,” Upnor said reproachfully.

Bob did not see fit to dignify this with a reply. He sidestepped up the bank; Upnor tracked him until he stopped. Then the Earl turned his head sideways and cupped his hand to his ear like a bad actor. “Hark! Patrick Sarsfield’s cavalry is approaching, I do believe!”

“Those sound like Danish hooves to me.”

Upnor made a sound like heh-heh, a completely unconvincing simulation of a laugh.

“Why are you playing message-boy, my lord? Why is not St. Ruth doing his job?”

“Because his head was carried off by a cannonball,” Upnor responded. He brought the back of his hand to his mouth, pretending to cover a yawn. “It is a dull sword-fight so far,” he complained.

“Let me across and it will become exciting soon enough.”

“No, it is that you lack passion! A Frenchman would have leaped over by now. Perhaps it would help if I told you that I have fucked your sweet Abigail.”

“I assumed as much,” Bob said levelly.

“And you…haven’t?”

“It is none of your business.”

“It is all of my business, as she is my property, and I broke her maidenhead with this rapier, just as I am about to break yours with this one! So do not be coy, Sergeant, I know you have not enjoyed Abigail. Perhaps you shall, one day. But be sure to bring some sheep-gut. I am afraid that I, or one of my friends, have given her a nasty social disease.”

Bob jumped over the ditch at this time. Upnor backed away and let him land safely, but then closed in on him quickly, twitching the rapier with his right hand and now drawing a dagger with his left.

“Don’t look at the poniard, silly man,” Upnor chided him. “You must fix your gaze upon your opponent’s eyes-just as Abigail Frome stares into mine when I am pleasuring her.”

Bob, reckoning that this was enough, wrapped his right arm across his body, drawing the blade back in position to let go a hay-maker. Part of the plan was to convince Upnor that his predictable taunts had actually made Bob angry. So Bob let out a bellow as he launched himself toward Upnor while letting go a mighty backhanded swing.

This was something he had practiced for a whole month with Monsieur LaMotte. Upnor’s light blade could never stand up to a scything attack by the heavier spadroon, and so he had little choice but to drop his blade and step back to let it whoosh by. But Bob’s forward rush would bring him into dagger range. So Upnor drew his right foot (which had been foremost) back, while pivoting on his left, turning sideways to let Bob charge past him. At the same time he raised his left hand so that he could plunge the dagger into Bob’s ribs as he went by.

All of which went according to plan except for the last bit. For instead of rushing by standing up, Bob had planted his feet and dived forwards, so that his trunk was too low to receive Upnor’s dagger. The back-handed cut had flung his body into a twisting movement from his left to his right, and so as he hurtled past he was spinning to face his opponent’s legs. Bob’s left arm and shoulder went through first, extended to take his impact on the ground. Then his head, and the right arm and spadroon trailing along his body. As soon as his left elbow struck the peat he curled that arm around and caught Upnor’s right leg, trapping it against his body.

Upnor needed that leg to take his weight as he moved backwards, and thus had no choice but to fall down, even as Bob was getting his own knees under him. Upnor knew that to fall on his stomach was death, so he spun and landed on his arse and rolled up onto his back, his legs going straight up in the air. If this were a Parisian Salle d’Armes he might have turned it into a backwards somersault and come up fighting, but this was nearly impossible in a stiff cuirass. So Upnor’s legs and arse reached apogee and then came down again. He was going to come up forwards. He planted his right elbow to push off against the ground but kept his guard up with the left, keeping that dagger pointed in the air. Bob had now got up on one knee and managed to take a swing at it. He fully intended to take Upnor’s hand off at the wrist, but either his aim was bad or Upnor reacted with exceptional speed, because instead the blow struck the dagger’s handle just behind the guard, right where Upnor’s thumb and index finger gripped it, and ripped it loose from Upnor’s hand. It whirred off and vanished in gloom and mist.

Upnor did a sideways roll away from Bob and came up angry. “You are a cold, cold, cold-blooded knave!” he exclaimed. “I think you do not care about Abigail at all!”

“I care enough to win this.”

“You have been practicing against someone who knows the rapier,” Upnor said. “Tell me, did he show you this?”

Bob liked to sit in a meadow and throw bits of bread to the birds. He had done this once with a flock of some hundred pigeons who had, once they’d gotten the general idea, surrounded him and waited patiently for him to throw out each scrap. But presently a sparrow had come along and begun to collect evey last crumb that Bob tossed, even though it had been one against a hundred. Even if Bob lured the sparrow to one side, then threw the morsel to the other, the little bird would come across like a flash of light from a signal-mirror and wend its way among the stumbling pigeons and pluck the bread right out from under their open beaks, which would snap together on thin air.

Bob now learned that he was a pigeon and Upnor a sparrow. One moment he was certain that his spadroon was about to take Upnor’s leg off at the knee, and the next, the Earl was somewhere else, and the point of the rapier was headed for Bob’s heart. In desperation he pawed at it with his left hand and diverted it so that it got him just under the ribs on the right side and passed out his back. As Bob fell back, his flailing left hand struck the guard of the rapier, a swirl of silvery bars, and his fingers closed around it. This would prevent Upnor from drawing it out and stabbing Bob again and again as he lay on the ground. Bob landed flat on his back, preceded by that part of the rapier that had gone all the way through him, and found himself pinned, nailed like Jesus. Upnor was pulled forward and ended up staring down into Bob’s face from not far away.

“Lung?” Upnor guessed.

“Liver,” Bob said, “or else I could never do this.” He inhaled and then spat at Upnor’s face, but it came out as a feckless spray.

“’Twill be a slow-festering wound then,” Upnor said. “I will gladly supply you with a quicker death if you will be so good as to let go my weapon.” He glanced up for a moment, distracted by the sound of hurtling cavalry. “Sarsfield,” he pronounced. “Let us finish, I must go to them.”

Bob turned his head sideways, just to get Upnor’s visage out of his sight. He saw a queer thing silhouetted against the deepening gray sky above the hill: a fellow in a gray coat perched on a pole above a ditch, not far away. No, he was not perched, but swinging across it, a matted ponytail trailing behind him like a profusion of battle-streamers from a regimental flag. It was an Irish infantryman, pole-vaulting across the ditch. Coming to the aid of Upnor, his English overlord. He would probably have a dirk or something to finish Bob off with.

“When you go to the next world,” Upnor said, “tell the angels and demons that we know everything about your infamous cabal, and that we will have the gold of Solomon!”

“What the bloody hell are you talking about!?” Bob exclaimed. But before answering, Upnor peeled Bob’s hand off the guard, pinky first. He planted his foot in Bob’s stomach and stood up, yanking the blade out.

“You know perfectly well,” he said indignantly, “Now go and do as I have instructed you!” He aimed a death-blow at Bob’s heart. Bob put his hands up to slap it aside. Then a large object hurtled across the sky and smashed into the rapier’s guard, crumpling the bars and sending it spinning away.

Upnor staggered back, gripping a damaged hand. Bob looked up to see a bulky figure in a ragged muddy gray coat, gripping eight feet or so of pike-staff: the same bit that Bob had broken off the cavalry standard.

Bob levered himself up on his elbow and rose to a seated position to find the cool, level gaze of Teague Partry directed his way. Teague had a head like a cube of limestone, and brown hair pulled back tight against his skull, though many strands had come loose during the day’s fighting and been plastered back with mud. His blue-gray eyes were set close together, redoubling the intensity of his glare.

“What d’you think y’are, a character in a friggin’ novel, Bob? Can you not perceive that the gentleman is wearin’ armor, and knows more concernin’ swordsmanship than you ever will?”

“I perceive it well enough now, Teague.”

Upnor had, during Teague’s scolding of Bob, gone over and retrieved his rapier. He held it now in his left hand, advancing crab-wise toward Teague.

“Look out, Teague, he’s as dangerous with his left as he is with his right-”

“Bob! You make too much and too little of him at the same time. As a ’fencer he’s a caution, ’tis plain enough to see, but in the larger scheme, Bob, what is he but a friggin’ tosser wavin’ a poker around in the dark.” By this time Upnor had advanced to within about eight feet and so Teague gave his stave a toss upward, gripped it with both hands at the end, and with a grunt, swung it round in a long arc parallel to the ground, catching Upnor in the side and flattening him. Upnor made a grab at the end of the staff, which had ended up hovering over his face, but his movements were cramped by his steel cuirass, which now sported a huge dent jabbing deep into his side. Teague withdrew the stave, shifted his grip so that he was holding it in the middle, raised it up above his head, and began to execute a series of brisk stabbing motions, with the occasional mighty swing. These were accompanied by metallic bashing sounds and screams from Upnor’s end of the stick.

Between these efforts he sent the following, loosely connected string of comments and observations Bob’s way:

“You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naive understanding of violence! You are embarrassin’ me in front of the lads! You can’t play by their rules or they’ll win unfailingly! You don’t engage in courtly play-fightin’ with one such as this. You get a great friggin’ tree-branch and keep hittin’ him with it until he dies. Like that. D’you see, boys?”

“Aye, Uncle Teague,” came back two voices in unison.

Bob looked to the other side of the ditch and saw a pair of blond lads there, each holding the reins of a horse. One of them-it looked like Jimmy-had the horse Bob had rode in on, and the other-by process of elimination, Danny-had the standard-bearer’s.

“There,” Teague said. “Now get you over the ditch and be gone with the lads.”

“I’ve been run through the liver.”

“All the more reason to stop your lollygaggin’. You’ll bleed to death shortly or heal up in a few weeks-the liver has a miraculous power of regeneration, while the body lives. Take it from an Irishman.”

Bob slumped forward on his hands, then got his knees under him. He could hear blood dripping onto the ground. But it was only dripping, not coming in a continuous stream, or (worse) a series of spurts. If he had seen a private soldier with such a wound, he’d have guessed that the fellow would live, once the wound was packed with something to stop the bleeding. Upnor had been right; if Bob died of this, it would be because it festered in the days to come.

“I’m not askin’ you to walk. You may ride one horse and the boys may share the other.”

“And you, Teague?”

“Oh, it’s into the ditch with me, Bob, into the bog. I’ll collect a musket from one of the Englishmen I killed today, and go a-rappareein’.” Teague’s eyes now turned into running pools, and he tilted his head back and sniffled. “Get you gone, none of us has a moment to waste.”

“I’ll raise a monument in London,” Bob promised, and got up slowly. He did not pass out.

“To me? They wouldn’t have it!”

“To Upnor,” Bob said, staggering past the Earl’s smashed corpse, and kicking the rapier aside into the watercourse. “A fine statue of him, looking just as he does now, and an inscription: ‘In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.’ ”

Teague considered it for a moment, then nodded. “In Connaught,” he added.

“In Connaught,” Bob agreed, then eyed the ditch. It looked as wide as the Shannon. But the boys were waiting on the other side: Jack’s boys, and now Bob’s. For under the circumstances they were likely the only children Bob would ever have. Teague gave him a mighty shove in the arse as he flew back over the water. By the time Bob got up from a rough, agonizing tumble on the far side and turned to thank him, Teague Partry was gone.